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Navigating the Universe of Web Information in the
Multimedia Classroom

Abstract

As higher education institutions continue to increase the amount of
technology in the classroom, the amount of world wide web information that
supplements coursework continues to grow. Making a web page with links to
related sites for use in class and instructing students on finding web
information can be a daunting task for many faculty members and teachers.
Librarians are filling a new role in the classroom by providing assistance
in searching the web for class resources and teaching internet searching
techniques. This paper will focus on librarians experiences in a new,
experimental multimedia classroom at Rice University. In particular, it
will detail the role one librarian has had in re-examining the traditional
roles of a librarian and how those can be applied to working with faculty
using the world wide web in a multimedia classroom environment. As is
particularly appropriate to the universe theme of the conference, the
librarian will discuss her work in selecting web resources and teaching
web searching techniques for a Physics and Astronomy class at Rice. While
this presentation details the experiences at one institution, the topic is
applicable to any librarian working with teachers/faculty members. This
presentation is primarily geared towards institutions of higher education,
but is appropriate for all levels. It will cover how librarians can
manage the collaboration process with faculty, searching the internet for
resources, evaluating resources, organizing web pages, and teaching
internet searching to students. Specific examples of web pages and
instructional tools will be provided.

Discussion

While most librarians are aware of the increasing amount of electronic
resources available in and from libraries, they may not realize how much
web information is being used in todays higher education classrooms.
Librarians have the opportunity to go beyond the walls of the library and
help teachers and students understand how to search the web effectively,
find resources, evaluate these resources, and use these resources for
teaching and learning.

At Rice University (http://www.rice.edu), the construction of a multimedia classroom in the library has provided an opportunity to examine the roles a librarian can play in such an environment. In the Summer of 1994, Rice University was awarded a grant from the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation to provide a data librarian and an educational specialist for support of a new Electronic Studio. This studio, known as the Gardiner Symonds Teaching Laboratory ({http://cttl.rice.edu/projects/Symonds/}), houses semester-long classes from a wide-variety of disciplines, as well as single-session workshops and seminars. The Symonds Laboratory is housed in {Fondren Library} (http://www.rice.edu/fondren/), the main library at Rice, and it is maintained by Information Technology's Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning (http://cttl.rice.edu), of which the data librarian is a member. In the Spring of 1996, the Lab was officially dedicated and a data librarian for the facility was hired in the Summer of 1996.

Collaboration with Course Instructors

This librarian was charged with working with course instructors in the
Laboratory to help them acquire and organize materials for educational
purposes. The librarian first worked with the teachers and students from
the course Natural Science 111 (NSCI 111), Science Today I: Physics and
Astronomy. Experiences from this course would then be used to gauge what
librarian skills were most and least helpful in a multimedia environment,
especially in relation to using the web. The NSCI 111 course is an
integrated survey of key principles in physics and astronomy, intended for
nonscience/engineering majors.

The two sections of the class were conducted in the Symonds Laboratory.
Given the collaborative architecture of the facility, classes were taught
on a part lecture, part individual and teamwork basis. The class was
equally divided between lecture and the instructors working with students
individually as they navigated the web and worked on class assignments.

Prior to the first day of the course, the librarian met with instructors
to discuss the goals of the course and the resources that would best
assist in achieving these goals. The instructors wanted to use many web
resources to supplement students research. In addition, students
would be submitting their homework on their own personal web pages, which
would require students learn how to build such pages. The instructors and
librarian agreed that there would be a main course page, linking to other
related pages. The instructors were responsible for maintaining the
following sections: Syllabus and Weekly Schedule, Important Current
Announcements, Course Instructors, and Class Roster. The librarian
maintained links to relevant web resources for each weeks
assignments. The result of these efforts can be found at the Natural Science 111 course page
site (http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~nsci111/).

Selection and Evaluation of Resources

As many collection development librarians know, it can be difficult to evaluate resources in an area where you have limited expertise. In the case of the Physics and Astronomy course, the librarian used standard search engines and subject guides such as Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/), Excite (http://www.excite.com), {HotBot} (http://www.hotbot.com/), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com) and {MetaCrawler} (http://www.metacrawler.com/) to find some initial resources related to each week's topics. In addition, many selected sites had links to other sites that were deemed useful. Each web site that was eventually linked from the NSCI 111 page was selected using several evaluative criteria.

Is an author listed?

What are the credentials of the author?

Will the author be held accountable for information presented?

Is there a bias or a commercial interest?

Who is the intended audience of the page?

How current is the information?

Are references, citations, or links to other resources included?

Those sites such as those presented by NASA (National Aeronautics and
Space Administration), educational institutions, and museums were
generally preferred to pages such as ones presented by individuals with an
interest in a particular topic, but without expertise in the area. The
selected sites tended to have reliable, accurate information with a
mission to educate the users of the information. Those sites that were
excluded were ones that contained inaccuracies, out-of-date information,
and highly biased information. All sites were reviewed by course
instructors, as well as the librarian, before inclusion on the course web
page.

By attending all of the classroom sessions, rather than just coming to the
class for one bibliographic instruction session, the librarian was
able to become more familiar with the topics covered, the needs of the
course instructors, and the skills of the students. As the semester
progressed and the librarian learned more about the class and the topics,
web resources were added and removed from the course web page.

Teaching Internet Searching to Course Instructors and Students

While many resources were presented to students for each week's assignments, students were also asked to find their own web sites to support their research. At the beginning of the course, the librarian taught the students and teachers a one-hour class in {Internet searching strategies} (http://www.rice.edu/fondren/tmp/netguides/strategies.html) which covers the following topics:

Formulating a Strategy

Maximizing Your Search Results

Evaluating Internet Resources

Citing Internet Resources

In a variety of settings, librarians can use their traditional
bibliographic instruction skills and apply those in teaching how to
effectively search the Internet. This requires that librarians become
familiar with several things:

What types of information can be expected to be found on the Internet?

Which Internet resources are best for searching for what types of
information?

What syntax is needed to refine a search query?

How to effectively evaluate Internet resources.

What is a reasonable search set on the Internet?

A librarian can gain and refine these skills by regularly using the
Internet, reading articles and reviews of web sites and search engines,
and working with experts in the subject areas being searched. Unlike
traditional print and CD-ROM resources, Internet resources may be unstable
and vary in the information contained from day-to-day. Librarians need to
be flexible enough to effectively handle unpredictable situations.

In having the librarian working in the classes throughout the semester,
the students were able to develop a relationship with the librarian where
they felt comfortable asking for help with searching for information on
the Internet. In addition, the students were able to build on and refine
their web searching skills and learn more advanced searching techniques
from the librarian. Also, the students gained a better appreciation of the
web and its construction by building their own web pages for class.

The two faculty members who taught the NSCI 111 class were very positive
about their experience in working with the librarian to find and identify
useful resources for their class. In both their survey feedback and
in-person interviews, both instructors said that working with the
librarian in the classroom was an extremely valuable experience that
allowed them to use a much wider-variety of resources that were very
useful in the course.

Next Time Around: Lessons Learned

As noted earlier, the librarian working with the NSCI 111 classes gained
insights into what types of roles could play in future courses. Several of
these lessons can be summarized as follows:

Teaching Internet searching skills is one of the most valuable
services a librarian can provide in helping others using the
web. If librarians become familiar with the various search
engines/subject guides, their strengths and weaknesses, and their search
syntax, it can be a useful time saver and help for those learning from the
librarians.

It is important to realize that there are many forms in which
information can be presented today. Helping instructors and
students realize that there is a variety of media such as books, journals,
CD-ROMs, videotapes, microfiche, microfilm, Usenet newsgroups, as well as web
sites that can all provide valuable information, can be of great service.
Helping people learn how to retrieve items in this variety of media is
another skill that a librarian can bring to the classroom.

In addition, several questions were raised by this experience:

While it is helpful to teach people how to find information,
should librarians be expected to offer instruction of specific software
applications? It seems that librarians have learned how to use
and teach the use of computer applications, but should they be expected to
be experts in this area? This may be an increasing necessity for
librarians. They especially need to be familiar with applications such as
web browsers (Netscape, Microsoft Explorer), telnet (tn3720, wtnvt), and
file transfer protocol (ftp) tools (fetch, WS_FTP), which are used to
access information over the Internet.

Where do librarians draw the line on how much help is too
much help? It may be appropriate for librarians to help
instructors and students find resources that suit their needs, but does
this mean that its appropriate for librarians to do things such as
building a specific web page of resources for a particular class?
Traditionally, when assisting a class, librarians tend to pull out a few
standard resources for use with the classhow do you best translate
this for finding web resources for a class? There is a fine line between
bringing librarian skills and doing work that could be
done by an instructors graduate teaching assistant.

While it is useful for getting to know the students and
instructors better, is it worth a librarians and a classs
time for the librarian to attend every class session of a course?
The amount of time used to search for information, such as searching for
information on the web, in a class can vary. The downtime from searching
for information in a class may make it difficult to justify the
librarian being available to the class for every session.

What are the skills and strengths of being a
librarianhow can we apply these in these new situations?
Academic librarians should take the time to reconsider their current
roles and think about how they can create new roles to meet their
users changing needs. The web and the advent of more multimedia
resources (e.g., CD-ROMs, videotapes, laser discs) present greater
opportunities and challenges for librarians to become experts in searching
for, accessing, and retrieving information.

Conclusion

Librarians bring a number of useful skills to accessing todays
technologically-based information. Experience in organizing, retrieving,
and evaluating information, as well as the ability to teach these skills
to others, is very applicable in the Information Age. Librarians can take
these skills beyond the library walls into the classroom, campus, and
community. With the increasing number of ways we can access information,
librarians have more opportunities than ever to discover how their skills
can be used to help others trying to find the information they need.